Landline Migration to Digital Voice

[JoanneandAndy]

We live in a very rural setting and suffer from poor broadband service. As such we have been watching the ongoing developments around the moving to Digital telephony services for some time. We have been finally told we will have to move this year.

I want to understand what our rights are here. BT are unable to provide a consistent level of broadband service and we have regular engineers out to fix issues with the copper line to our property. Being forced to move our landline to a digital service just doesn’t work, soaking up any capacity we do have and being further reliant on intermittent good broadband service. This is even more relevant as our mobile phone signal is also poor. 

Fibre to the cabinet / copper to the house will result in even worse service as we are so far from the exchange and the Openreach engineers have continually advised not to go down this route. Full fibre is a pipe dream. Laughably BT support advised us today they will be taking the copper cabling out at the same time as migration, not sure how they intend to keep us connected……

Appreciate any advice or views.

Many thanks

[licquorice]

If you are having line problems, it will also affect your current analogue phone service, that will not be any better or worse with DV.

The amount of bandwidth used for Digital Voice is miniscule and will have absolutely no effect on your broadband speed.

[chrisjp]

"Fibre to the cabinet / copper to the house will result in even worse service as we are so far from the exchange"

Distance from the exchange is not relevant if you get fibre to the cabinet (FTTC). It's distance to the cabinet that affects speed.
If you're currently on ADSL broadband, getting it via copper cable all the way from the exchange, then going to FTTC (VDSL) will almost certainly improve your broadband speed. I've no idea why the Openreach engineer advised against this.

[licquorice]

Actually that is not always the case. There is a crossover point where VDSL can be worse than ADSL. VDSL attenuates very quickly with distance compared to ADSL.

[iniltous]

At around 1000 to 1200M ADSL performance can be better than VDSL , but not many will be this far from their FTTC ‘cabinet’ .

The OP should confirm if they are currently on FTTC/VDSL or ADSL preferably by posting the modulation type from the router stats, but its seems incredible that they can have a stable landline service and flaky broadband , and not have repairable copper pair , but that’s what they say.

Perhaps the OP can post their addresses return from the DSL checker , so the predicted speed from both ADSL and VDSL ( assuming VDSL  is available ) can be seen .

https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL/AddressHome